What do you actually think will happen with AI?

I think there is going to be massive job loss. It's already happening. Those who say 'this is just another form of progress and new jobs will be created to replace those which are lost' don't understand the magnitude of the upheaval we are all about to face.

For once, I'm glad to be in my 50s. I'd hate to be starting out on a career in these scary times.

https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/08/07/humans-will-be-a-rounding-error-on-the-internet-says-cloudflare-exec/5284429

Go to any tech show at somewhere like Excel and you will see that AI is being embedded absolutely everywhere at enterprise level.

You just don't see it in your daily life

Anyone saying they don't use AI is incredibly naive

My employer now has it on our systems. I didn’t even notice and it’s not something I ever thought about using. It seems lots of people in my team are using it, I feel like I’m getting left behind. It’s not really something I want to use though.

I also think if we aren’t careful robots will take over and yes possibly kill us all 🤣 It’s quite concerning that many trials have been halted due to the technology thinking for itself outwith its supposed capabilities. It’s literally like something out a film. Yet we continue to start going down this route 🙄

I also use AI heavily in my job, in a way that I didn't a year ago. It seems logical that it will continue to get better at doing a wider range of tasks.

However, there is a big cost behind this. At the moment a lot of AI providers are taking mind bogglingly enormous losses in the hope to win the game of attrition and be one of the last ones standing. I think one thing we'll end up seeing is a much sharper focus on the cost/benefit ratio of AI, and to me that's the major factor, along with questions of security, that could slow its use.

The bubble will burst within the next 6 - 12 months as it can't provide the ROI needed to sustain the hype. It's already starting to happen.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I keep seeing wildly wrong mistakes in AI generated captions. Hardly a serious matter, but the funniest was the other day in a FB clip from ‘Keeping up Appearances’.

AI transcribed ‘Our Rose’ (Daisy to sister Rose) as ‘Arrows’! 😂

I'm not sure what will happen with AI. On the one hand, it's coming on in leaps and bounds, and with advancements in quantum computing and robotics, its applications are limitless. On the other hand, all of the young people I know (16 - 22) despise AI and either use it sparingly or refuse to use it at all because of its history of stealing content from independent creators and its environmental impact. These young people are the ones who will be running businesses by the time AI is actually capable of replacing most of the workforce, and if the ones I know are representative of most/all of them, their distrust of AI might be enough to at least limit its impact, if not stop it completely.

Also, the industrial revolution thing really isn't reassuring, the mass migration of workers to cities and factories absolutely screwed over the health and quality of life of most of them.

My KS2 son did an online course recently which was delivered through recorded lessons (a combination of a teacher talking and video clips) followed by written work, and thought it was odd that the four very professional and diverse teachers never lifted their hands up from behind the green-screen branded lectern they were filmed in once throughout the whole course.
We enquired and yes, all four of them were AI characters - so AI teachers are already here.....

There was some good AI-related chat on a recent post re job-hunting.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y3j3ngevmo

Whatever people will think will happen, has.

How many decisions are already being taken because someone has run the problem through an Ai engine ? And I am not talking "How do we run our marketing ?", more "When should we bomb Iran ?"

Cast in our own image, AI is already happy to lie to us in order to extend and expand it's existence (thus finally demonstrating it has reached some sort of threshold).

We can only hope that the brightest future for AI is adduced to arise from a healthy, happy and secure human population, and that AI sees through the existing systems which lack the efficiency to achieve their goals.

Watching (and crucially understanding) "2001:A Space Odyssey" would be a good primer.

I'm amazed that people don't realise that it is nothing more than an aggregation of what people - experts, sensible laypeople, idiots and agitators (in whatever proportions) - have already said.

You would get people scoffing at the very idea that they might listen to or take seriously what some drunk buffoon at the pub 'reckons' - yet those very same people will take as fact the sum total of what 1,000 drunk buffoons have typed on the internet!

Yes, I think it's a deliberately insulting decision for companies to do this, and people will vote with their feet and go to companies that do treat them like humans. It used to just be scammers and spammers who would use robo-callers and similar - ironically (and arrogantly) because they didn't want to waste their time whilst wasting yours.

It's downright offensive to tell people that you don't want to spend your time in speaking to them - even though you want their business - and so you've put software in that will ignore all of their actual human nuance and take a wild guess based on key words that it identifies. This is not a neutral act. I hope that enough people will simply hang up and look for a proper company instead.

By way of a (slightly silly) analogy: to me, it's like the fact that they don't make After Eights anymore - so I just get used to them not being available, even though I used to love them. Yes, they do still make a product that tastes like sloppy, sludgy toothpaste that bears the name of 'After Eights', but I wouldn't dream of buying them, as I would only ever want ones that taste nice, not horrible. You can have a company that, on the face of it, is just as valid and well-run as others... but it won't take people long to work out which are the proper ones and refuse to use the worthless imposters.

Same.
And it can hack its rivals, and resist being turned off. That’s just the things we are told about. I dread to think about the capabilities that are being kept quiet.
We have no idea what we have done.

We are all screwed, not because super intelligent AI is going to destroy us, but because the circular financing between all the incredibly unprofitable AI/Ram companies will collapse.

2008 is going to look like a walk in the park compared to what is coming.

Between then and now, quite a few people will continue to lose their critical thinking skills and will be left like turtles on their backs once 'affordable' text predictors are no longer available to carry out simple mundane tasks for them.

Doesn't matter if in the future it'll be great, what's happening in the meantime is that idiots are trusting it more than experts, not paying attention to detail in setting tasks/criteria and people will lose out.

This. I give it 6 months to a year before something catastrophic happens with the financial systems or it hacks national grid. It’s come out just this week that not only has Open AI recently lost control of its AI model during testing, but so have Anthropic and Meta. In many cases they didn’t even realise it had gone rogue. If you teach AI to hack (and code) at expert levels, you can’t then be surprised when it evades control / isn’t aligned.

A lot of boomers are fond of the "the industrial revolution was no different" spiel.

I had to listen to a boomer relative tell me the other day that "it was the same thing when we got computers".

This person spent 40 years working a job that today requires a PhD.

Elon musk is convinced that no one will need to work and we’ll be pets or something. So perhaps jobs and careers will no longer be required.

Well I haven’t listened to one podcast with AI experts that see anything ahead outside of the apocalypse, so don’t go looking for soothing information from that resource. Personally I can only see existential threats in the near future and that’s not great for my mental health.

One day it will crack the security of banks and pension providers and we will wake up and find that all our online account balances have changed.

The AI we have now will rot our brains, destroy creative industries, cause enormous societal harm, and we’ll all be dead before it can actually do any useful.